The House at Chorlton

by Prue Leith

Genres: Sagas; Family Life

Synopsis

Epic multi-generational family saga from household name Prue Leith, perfect for fans of Penny Vincenzi and Barbara Taylor Bradford.

A proud family. Snubbed by aristocratic neighbour Lord Frampton at a coming-of-age ball, Donald Oliver dreams of the day he'll have his vengeance.

A wild daughter. Laura Oliver, beautiful and tempestuous, falls in love with Giovanni, an Italian ex-prisoner-of-war, now a humble cook. Disdaining her father's snobbishness - and his wrath - the couple flee to London.

A desperate hope. Giovanni and Laura arrive to a city that has not yet re-awoken after the traumas of war. Facing destitution, only their love for one another and their dream of opening a restaurant business keeps them going.

From Cotswolds farmland to London fish markets, society ballrooms to icy gutters, this is a tale of prejudice and ambition, power and passion, and one couple's struggle to overcome all obstacles and carve out a life of their own.

Release date: September 17, 2015

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 432

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

1940, late summer

Laura watched her father brushing his hair with his matching brushes, one in each hand. The brushes had tortoiseshell backs with silver edges which caught the light from the Anglepoise lamp on the tallboy. His signet ring on his ring finger glinted, too, and so did his hair.

‘What do you think, young lady?’ he asked, turning from the looking-glass. He looked, she thought, splendid. Just splendid. So elegant and smart in his blue-grey uniform.

She remembered years ago, when she’d been at the village primary school, he had come with Mummy to the Nativity play wearing his row of miniature medals on his tunic and carrying his hat. She’d been so proud of him. Then he’d retired from the RAF and worn tweeds, except when they went out to dinner or he went hunting, when he looked good, but not so good as in his uniform.

Things had changed again last year when war had been declared. He’d been re-called to the RAF and now he had some important new war job at the Moreton-in-Marsh airfield in Gloucestershire. Mummy had had to hang his uniform on the washing line to get rid of the smell of mothballs and she’d sponged and pressed the trousers and tunic and brushed his hat. Laura had felt proud and pleased when he’d asked her to polish the buttons on his tunic: she liked using the little brass button stick to keep the Brasso off the cloth and soon she had the buttons bright and shiny again. ‘You look wonderful, Daddy.’

He came over to her and lifted her chin. She could smell his lovely fresh tobacco smell.

‘And you are the prettiest young lady in the country.’ He held her face in his hands. ‘And don’t you worry about this silly war because it will soon be over. By the time you leave school it will be a distant memory, and I will make sure that my daughter has the best coming-out ball of the season, with the loveliest ball gown and the most eligible young men trailing after her. Would you like that?’

She laughed, delighted. ‘I don’t know. I don’t like boys, ’specially if they are the trailing-about kind. And I can’t dance.’

‘Ah, but I have a solution to that. You will go off to Paris and learn all the airs and graces of the upper classes, including how to dance.’ He kissed her forehead and grinned. ‘And in the meantime you should be making friends with the right young people. That school of yours is meant to be full of the cream of young womanhood, but you spend all your time with the vet’s daughter.’

Laura, stung, coloured up. ‘But you like Sophie, Daddy. What’s wrong with Sophie? She’s my best friend.’

He gave her a reassuring hug and instantly everything was all right again. ‘Of course I like her. Sophie is a jolly little thing, plump as a pudding. Not a patch on my beautiful daughter, of course. She’s coming hunting with us in the morning, isn’t she?’

Laura nodded, and Donald went on. ‘Let’s hope we get a good run. Ever since that woman took over the hunt, one hasn’t a clue what will happen.’

‘What woman, Daddy?’

‘The Countess Frampton. The Earl has gout and can’t ride to hounds anymore, and all the men are at the front or doing war jobs, so she’s now the new MFH.’

‘Mummy said you should have been the Master.’

He smiled at her. ‘Well, between you and me, but never say I said so, I’d have made a much better Master than Lady Geraldine.’

‘But you have a war job, too.’

‘True. Two jobs really. The War Ag Committee and the airfield. But I’d have managed somehow. At least the hunt is still going, even if it is only on Saturdays. Some of the British hunts have packed up for the duration of the war. So, my girl, you should hunt all you can while you have the chance. Some of the young girls who turn out now are from very good families – you should make some excellent friends. Make up for that hopeless school of yours.’

‘But Roedean is a terrific school. You said so yourself, Daddy.’

‘Well, it certainly costs enough, and it should introduce you to the right people. But now the whole school has decamped to the Lake District, I doubt if there will be much chance to meet other girls’ families.’

‘Miss Janis says Roedean is all about education,’ Laura replied.

‘Not in my book. The point of boarding school is to make the right friends. For boys it is to find friends who’ll help in their career. For girls it is to find friends with suitable brothers.’

She made a disapproving face. ‘Suitable brothers?’

‘Yes. Suitable as potential husbands for my precious only daughter.’

Donald Oliver ran the back of his index finger along the underside of his moustache, first on one side and then the other, put on his hat, straightened it in front of the glass, tucked his Balkan Sobranie pouch in his tunic pocket and patted it flat so it wouldn’t look lumpy. He picked up his briar pipe with one hand and patted her on the head with the other – like a dog, she thought, but it was nice anyway.

Laura followed him down the stairs, thinking that he was everything a man should be: handsome, decisive, in control. He always looked so smart. ‘Master of all he surveyed’ came into her head. He still had all his thick black hair, neatly parted in the middle and shining with Brylcreem; his moustache was narrow and neat, like two small black wings on his top lip. When she was little she thought everyone in the RAF had to have moustaches like wings, to match the wings on their jackets.

Laura didn’t know what her Roedean classmates’ fathers or brothers were like. She’d never been asked to any of their houses. Since the Army had commandeered Roedean’s buildings in Sussex and the pupils and staff had moved to Keswick, most of the girls were now miles away from their homes anyway.

And her friends from her village school days were children of farmers or tradesmen from Moreton-in-Marsh and neighbouring villages. The fathers were much younger than Daddy, who was fifty-four, but they were mostly ugly and wore dull brown clothes and scuffed boots. She supposed the ones in uniform would look better, but she hadn’t seen them.

Her oldest brother, Hugh, also wore RAF officer’s uniform, though the stripes on his sleeves were much narrower than Daddy’s. Before the war he’d been in charge of their farm, but he had been called up, too, and sent away to Canada to train as a bomber pilot. Now he and his wife Grace and their baby daughter, Jane, still lived in the farmhouse, Plumtree Cottage. Daddy had ‘pulled some strings’, he said, because Hugh could have been posted miles away. Hugh now flew Wellington bombers from the airfield where Daddy worked.

Hugh was twenty years older than Laura, as old as most fathers, but he was wonderful. She was almost as proud of him as she was of Daddy – not many girls’ brothers flew aeroplanes. When she heard the rumbling drone of the Wellingtons, she’d watch their steady progress overhead and wonder which one contained Hugh, and she’d close her eyes and pray that he’d get back safely. He laughed at her anxieties and said so far he’d been mostly dropping leaflets, not bombs. In fact, he was jealous of his mates who had been sent to bomb Berlin, and he sometimes wished he flew a Spitfire so that he could join the scrap going on in the skies over London. He spoke as if it was a game – and Hugh loved games.

But her father was her hero. He had bought her Rufus, a proper 15-hand hunter, for her birthday and together they went hunting or just hacking round the farms. He treated her like an adult; once, before the war, her father had taken her, without her mother or either of her brothers, to London for a treat. They had had lunch at the RAF Club, where he’d introduced her to other grown-ups as ‘my new young lady’, which was embarrassing but made her feel proud and pleased. Afterwards they’d gone to Lillywhites, where he’d bought her a proper hunting jacket, a white silk stock, a gold tie pin with a tiny leaping horse on it, and one of the new hard riding hats. Then they had tea upstairs at Fortnum’s. Glen Miller’s music was being played by real musicians and models swooshed between the tables wearing the most exotic clothes. She would never forget that day.

*

Laura’s second brother, David, had had his breakfast ages ago and was long gone to start his working day. It was harvest time and he’d been out in the fields since daybreak. He’d been managing the farm since the start of the war when Hugh had been called up and their father had returned to the RAF. David had wanted to join up, too, but his gammy leg, a legacy from suffering polio as a boy, had made that impossible. So at twenty-three he was running Chorlton. Daddy said he was too young for the job, but he seemed very old to Laura. To her, both her brothers seemed ancient, David ten years older than her and Hugh ten years older than David.

Laura watched her father and Hugh clattering out of the kitchen, Hugh still eating his toast, Daddy insisting on leaving ‘this minute’ and Mummy fussing over them both.

Maud shut the kitchen door after them, then sat down again at the table. Laura watched her spread dripping on her toast and tried to imagine how you could have three children over twenty years. None of her friends had such old siblings. It often felt as though she had three fathers, all telling her what to do. But mostly she adored them, and Mummy said they spoiled her. Which, she had to admit, they did sometimes.

‘Laura, you are dreaming again. Eat your porridge. I need you to help me with putting up the plums. Mrs Digweed has a bad cold and I have sent her upstairs to bed. And both the girls are out harvesting.’

‘Oh Mummy, please. I want to go, too. Let’s both go.’

Maud shook her head. ‘No, there’s a war on, darling, and I have to bottle plums. You can stay up there after lunch, though. But unless you help me this morning they won’t get any lunch. As well as the bottling, we need to do a picnic for everyone, and then supper for when you all get back.’

*

So Laura spent two hours helping her mother bottle plums in water, although she did so knowing that they wouldn’t be nearly as good as they used to be, before sugar was rationed, when they were done in syrup. Stacking the finished jars on the larder shelf, Laura compared them to the few left over from last year. The plums in syrup were beautiful, a lustrous orangey pink, the colour of sunset. The ones they had just bottled looked so dull by comparison.

Then they set to making sandwiches with the stodgy National Loaf. Some of them had nothing but slices of salted pork fat in them. Those were for the men, who needed more energy because they did the heavy lifting. Laura’s mother greeted her moans about the bread and the lack of cheese with her usual lecture about how lucky they were to have butter from their own cows and home-made hedgerow jam. And there was a hard-boiled egg for everyone, because the hens were laying well. ‘If you lived in a town, my girl, you’d get a scraping of marge and one egg a week if you were lucky.’

They packed up the picnic in a big basket, the sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper. Bottles of her mother’s elderflower cordial and demi-johns of cider from the Frampton Estate next door went into a second basket with a dozen enamel mugs, most of them chipped.

*

They loaded the picnic into a wheelbarrow and pushed it up the lane. Top End, reaped clean with most of the sheaves already in stooks, lay ahead of them with Twelve Acres beyond, its wheat still standing, washed pale gold by the sun.

Her mother, puffing slightly, stopped at the top of the rise. ‘It’s like one of those old paintings of rural life,’ she said. ‘All it lacks are yokels lolling on a bank and long-aproned maidens pouring cider from flagons.’

Laura agreed, but thought to herself that if David got his way one day the scene would look very different. It would be all tractors and harvesters. They walked round the edge of the field, and Laura could see her brother heaving sheaves upright and standing four or five together in stooks to dry in the sun. Poor David. He’d had only a year to go to get his degree at Oxford when he’d had to abandon his studies and come home. He’d been terribly cut up about it. He wanted to be a lawyer, not a farmer, and to add insult to injury, he hated being the only one not in uniform. The RAF must be mad turning him down, thought Laura. David works harder than anyone and he can lift a calf or vault a gate without a thought. And he’d make a smashing officer: the men all do what he says and he is always planning for the future, and doing sums, and pestering Daddy to buy modern equipment.

*

As soon as the workers saw that lunch had arrived, everyone downed tools and made their way to the edge of the field. They flopped down on the grass, the labourers pulling out their Woodbines. David patted his pockets for his tobacco, cigarette papers and the little machine, like a baby mangle, that he used to roll his cigarettes. Laura poured cider into mugs and handed them round while her mother dispensed sandwiches.

‘And mind you don’t tear the paper,’ warned Maud. ‘I want it back to use again.’

Laura sat down on the grass next to David to eat her lunch. As soon as he’d finished, he threw himself back and stretched his arms over his head.

‘So, Sis, are you staying to do a proper job with us, or going back to mess around in the kitchen with Mum?’

‘I’m staying.’ She looked down at her stocky brother, his shirt soaked under the arms and sticking to his barrel-like chest, sweat glistening on his neck. She could smell the sweat. It should be disgusting, she thought, but it isn’t – though it doesn’t smell positively good, like horses’ sweat. How odd to think she preferred the smell of Rufus after a gallop to the smell of her brother.

She remembered when the fields up here were all grass, not wheat. She asked David why they’d been planted.

‘Because we get paid an extra £2 for every acre of pasture that’s ploughed up. The government wants us to plant wheat to make bread.’

‘Why do we have this awful stuff then?’ Laura pinched a bit off her sandwich and rolled it into a grey lump. ‘It’s horrible.’

‘I suppose because we don’t produce enough wheat. So what we grow gets mixed with whatever else is going – barley, oats, potatoes – acorns for all I know.’

David closed his eyes and Laura knew he didn’t want to talk anymore. She lay back on the grass and looked at the sky, seamless and pale blue. Sometimes you saw skylarks up here, miles up, climbing in a spiral until they were almost out of sight. They sang all the way up, and then, silent, came plummeting down like a stone.

But now, she thought, you are more likely to see war planes, usually our bombers, droning steadily along in a bunch, maybe with Hugh flying one of them.

*

When Donald walked into the kitchen that evening, his wife was talking to Laura.

‘Look,’ Maud was saying, ‘it’s beautiful. How they manage such expensive card in the middle of a war is astonishing. It’s got gold edges, and the print is embossed.’

‘Oh, Mummy, can I go? I could get a weekend exeat. Surely I can go, too? I’m thirteen. And I look much older.’

‘What’s this?’ asked Donald. His wife handed him the invitation.

The Earl and Countess of Frampton

Request the pleasure of the company of

Mr and Mrs Donald Oliver

To a ball to celebrate the coming of age

Of their son,

Captain Lord George Maxwell-Calder

At 7pm on the 30th October 1940

At Frampton Hall, Oxfordshire

Carriages: 2am

Dress: Evening dress or uniform

Donald ran his thumb over the embossed coronet at the top of the card and savoured the moment. At last, he thought. The only times he and Maud had visited Frampton were for the annual fête, and then they’d never got beyond the garden. The Earl and Countess had greeted them with the same aloof courtesy with which they greeted the blacksmith. Their own invitations to tea and dinner had been politely refused, and no reciprocal gestures had been forthcoming.

Laura was hanging on his sleeve. ‘Can I go? Please, Daddy, please? I’ve never been to a ball. Can I go?’

Donald held his daughter’s face in his hands, tipping her head back to look into his eyes. ‘My dearest girl, I would love to take you to a ball. When you’re eighteen you can go to all the balls and dances, dinners and nightclubs you like. But we cannot insert you into the Earl’s party.’

Laura stamped out of the kitchen.

‘Poor love.’ Maud shook her head. ‘She’ll be even more upset when she learns that her brothers have both been asked.’

‘Have they indeed?’

‘They have. There is an invitation for David in the hall. And Grace came round for elevenses with Jane, worrying about what to wear.’

‘No doubt you women will have a lovely time fussing over ribbons, frills and furbelows for the next couple of months.’

‘Mmm. Well, at least clothes and material aren’t rationed yet. But I fear it will have to be “make do and mend”. We’re unlikely to get silk or satin.’

‘I’ll answer the invitation, my dear. I assume you want to go?’

‘Yes, of course. Though I’m so awkward at parties. I wish you could take Laura. She’d be a much jollier companion than your frumpy old wife, and she’d enjoy it more, too.’

Donald secretly agreed with her but he patted her on the back, saying, ‘Nonsense, my dear. Don’t fish for compliments. You are neither frumpy nor old.’

*

Donald replied to the invitation at his wife’s writing desk in the morning room, and then sat back with the newspaper. These days it was a thin affair, filled with condensed reports of the war, advice to housewives about saving fuel, and small advertisements for things like Sanatogen or Vim Scouring Powder. He laid it down and looked out of the window, pondering the change of heart that had led to the Earl inviting them to the ball.

He supposed the old snob was asking all the neighbouring gentry. Well, it was about time, too. But he’d bear no ill-feelings. It would be a good opportunity to start afresh.

Of course, he mused, pleasantries are exchanged after church and everyone is friendly out hunting. The Earl was only too glad to have an annual meet at Chorlton. Damn right he was – it cost the hunt nothing whereas it cost Donald a pretty penny: re-surfacing the sweep in front of the house, using soft Cotswold gravel that wouldn’t hurt their precious horses’ hooves; whisky as well as stirrup cup for everyone; and trays of Maud’s Yorkshire fruit cake served with Wensleydale from Brown’s. It’d been lavish before the war, but even this season, he was sure, nobody would match Chorlton for a good hunt send-off. Yet not a single invitation to anything had ever resulted from his hospitality. Until now.

CHAPTER TWO

Donald’s gaze dwelt for a second on his precious Bentley before he climbed into it. Good, old Sawkins had washed and waxed it. He backed the car carefully out of the garage, swung her round and drove across the back yard, scattering hens and geese, then honked his horn to alert Sawkins to open the gate to the back lane. The ancient chauffeur saw him, raised his fingers to his cap and hurried, stiff-legged, to oblige.

Sawkins stood by the gate. ‘’Aft’noon, Guvnor,’ he said, touching his cap again as Donald drove through. Donald acknowledged the greeting with a slight incline of his head. The old boy has aged a lot, he thought, like everything else round here.

The car rocked as he negotiated the potholes and resolved to do something about them before winter. Then he remembered he’d had the same thought last winter and done nothing about it. The estate was falling into disrepair. Except, of course, the bits that showed: the main drive still impressed with its raked gravel between neatly edged lawns on either side. And the front of the house, which had been repointed last year with the window frames painted, looked positively ship-shape and Bristol fashion.

He bumped down the back lane towards the main road with Chorlton on the right and Frampton on the left, inspecting hedges and fences as he went. Both estates had failed to cut the hedges last winter. They were now ragged and overgrown and the fences had several broken rails. David intended, he’d said, to put Chorlton’s perimeters right this winter. He doubted if Frampton’s would ever be fixed.

From the time he’d bought Chorlton until the outbreak of war things had gone badly. They’d had to compete with cheap lamb from New Zealand, cheap wheat from North America, cheap everything from the Empire. The whole of British agriculture had been in the doldrums in the thirties and neither he nor Hugh had been able to make the farm pay.

But now young David seemed to be making a surprisingly good fist of it, even though Donald had had little hope of him succeeding. When he had taken over the farm the labour situation had been dire: their able-bodied men had gone to war, leaving only the ancient and the decrepit, and a few gormless school leavers champing at the bit to be old enough to get themselves killed.

Thank God for their land girl, Jill. Damned if she isn’t the best thing that’s happened to Chorlton, he mused. Who would have thought it? He remembered the conversation with his wife:

‘Maud,’ he’d said, ‘don’t be ridiculous. I’m sure she’s perfectly nice, but why should we give bed and board, and a salary, to Dr Drummond’s grand relation who will be perfectly useless on the land?’

‘What makes you say that? Why should she be useless? Many of the land girls come from middle-class, even upper-class, homes and prove to be excellent workers.’

‘Drummond says her interests are music and mathematics, so she’s not going to like drenching cows or digging ditches, is she? Anyway, why does she want to be a land girl?’

‘I think her parents would prefer her in England rather than in the Forces. Any parent would. Also, she’s opposed to war.’

‘God, a Conchie to boot! I won’t have it, Maud.’

But he did have it. Land girls were the only solution to the shortage of farm labour and at least he knew the girl was honest and healthy.

Jill was eighteen years old. Tall and skinny with a mop of black curls and large hazel eyes set in a handsome, slightly beaky face, she made Donald think of a crane or a heron, all legs and sudden jerks. But to everyone’s astonishment, she turned out to be as capable out on the farm as with the admin. She was quickly indispensable. Please God she’d stay for the duration.

At least Donald no longer had the enormous wage bill he’d had before the war. The family shouldered a lot of the work on the farm, and they weren’t paid. But he hated to see his wife darning, sewing, scrubbing, cleaning and trying to make palatable meals out of their rations. Strangely, though, Maud seemed to enjoy it. When her remaining maid-of-all-work, Phyllis, had joined the Wrens, she was left with only poor old Digweed and the village lass who came in on Mondays to scrub the floors and help with the washing. He shook his head slightly as he thought of his obstinate wife insisting on taking personal charge of the pigs, like a peasant.

Maud was a good and loyal wife, though, no doubt about that. She’d been happiest when she was a schoolteacher in Halifax and he worked in his father’s mill. She hadn’t wanted to sell up and come down south, didn’t understand that he couldn’t run a woollen mill all his life, that he was made for better things, even if she wasn’t.

*

Donald cranked the windscreen open a crack to get a bit of cool air on his face and neck, although now he could smell the burning stubble in the fields to his right, quickly followed by the muck being spread on the left. Well, he thought, that’s the price you pay to be a landowner.

That thought brought him back to Chorlton and the conversation that morning at breakfast.

Over his porridge, David had announced, ‘Listen, everyone. The Ministry chaps were here yesterday, and we’re to get top prices for the wheat, barley and oats. And we’ve exceeded our quotas by eleven per cent.’

‘But that’s just wonderful,’ exclaimed Maud.

‘Congratulations, my boy,’ said Donald.

David reached for the teapot. ‘It wasn’t all my doing. Jill has more than played her part.’

They all looked at Jill, and Donald saw a blush running up her neck. ‘I’m sure that’s true, Jill. We’d never have done it without you,’ he agreed.

‘And having a guaranteed buyer does make life a lot easier,’ said David.

Laura asked, ‘Does the Ministry have to pay us for everything?’

‘I’m glad to say they do,’ said Donald. ‘After all, we are planting what they demand, so it’s only right.’

David added, ‘But they can reject it, or pay less if the quality isn’t there. So they come and inspect it. It’s good news, and we still have the potatoes from Little End to come, though I’m not looking forward to lifting them. It’s back-breaking work. Next year we need more machines.’

‘We can’t afford it, David,’ said Donald. ‘The war won’t last forever.’

‘I should hope it won’t!’ exclaimed Maud. ‘Though it doesn’t look as if it will really be over by Christmas.’

‘Dad,’ said David firmly, ‘it’s true the war helps with subsidies and prices, but the only way we will survive, war or no war, is by being more efficient.’

Donald shook his head. ‘As soon as peace returns we will be back with unfair competition from abroad and no market for our produce.’

The argument, which they’d had before, continued, but with less irritation on Donald’s side than usual. After all, the boy had done well, and maybe America’s Lend-Lease scheme would yet come off and the Yanks would provide the equipment that David seemed so certain that they needed.

*

The rising and dipping road to Chipping Norton passed the Bliss Tweed Mill, which put Donald in mind of his old mill in Halifax. A smile of self-satisfaction crossed his face as he thought of his great coup: selling up in 1918, before the gravy train hit the buffers. The Olivers had done well out of the Great War and with any luck this one would put Chorlton back in the money. His father had made a fortune supplying worsted to the Army, but once the war was over, well, even a child could see . . .

With the money from the sale of the mill safely in the bank, he’d had fifteen glorious years in the RAF. He’d been in at the start, just a year after the Royal Flying Corps broke away from the Army. He’d got his wings at the Central Flying School and passed out as Pilot Officer Donald Oliver at Cranwell. That had been a truly great day. He’d never forget the joy and pride of joining Number 12 Squadron at RAF Andover and flying Heyford bi-planes. But then that idiot of a Wing Co had had him transferred to Logistics. He’d resented it at the time – flying was considered a cut above paper pushing – but at least he could still sport wings on his tunic. And his talents in administration were soon rewarded with a mix of home postings and foreign tours, which sent him steadily up the ranks.

Best of all had been their last tour, in India. He’d been in his element, with plenty of chums happy to share a snifter or a spot of lunch in the mess. In the heat of summer they’d gone up country and played a lot of polo and tennis; at weekends there were dinners and dances and every evening they’d have sundowners on the club verandah. He’d had a driver, a syce and servants to blanco his plimsoles and polish his boots.

But Maud hadn’t been happy. She said she felt like a fish out of water, which she was, of course. But her attitude had riled him.

‘Why won’t you come to the club? It’s not as if you have any work to do. You’ve got gardeners, kitchen staff, even an ayah for Laura.’

But she’d just smiled and said, ‘You go, darling. I’m no good at the social talk and you’re wonderful at it, and everyone adores you. You go.’

So he did, but it had irritated him that with all that opportunity to mix with the right set, Maud had preferred to stay at home with Laura. She also took every opportunity she could to go home to Blighty, taking Laura with her. To be with the boys, she said – Hugh was by then running Chorlton and David was at Eton.

*

Donald had long since learned to steer his mind off dwelling on the premature end to his original RAF career. But now, as he brooded on Maud’s failings, he concluded that if she hadn’t left him for such long periods he’d never have started the affair with Angela. And if that bloody little Squadron Leader husband of hers had had any honour he’d have tackled him himself, but of course he went weaselling off to the CO who’d said, the bastard, that Donald was lucky not to be cashiered. He’d had no option but to go on the retirement list.

Still, he thought with satisfaction, they’d had to get him back when it mattered. Funny how minor peccadilloes like a fling with a fellow officer’s wife can end a career in peacetime, but when they need you for the war effort, well, that’s a different story.

Donald’s mood lightened as an RAC patrolman saw his badge on the front fender and saluted. Quite right, too, he thought, nodding in acknowledgement. He’d been an RAC member for over twenty years, ever since he bought his first motorcar in 1919. He liked being saluted, though of course he’d never admit it.

More cheerful now, his mind flipped to his second great coup: buying Cho